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A dialogue between two congregations reveals how
people live in racial ‘bubbles.’

Eugene Stovall

Oakland, California March,
2017

Recently, my wife and I
attended a Lenten service at a local Oakland church. The pastor and flock from
a predominantly white congregation attended the Lenten service, hosted by the
pastor of a predominately black church. The integrated Lenten service was
followed by an ‘unflinching’ discussion on racism.

The pastors ___ the white pastor
having grown up in the Midwest and the black pastor having grown up in the Deep
South ___ started the discussion off by sharing their own experiences. The
black pastor, who resembles the former New York Congressman, Charles Rangel, assured
the assembly that, despite comments to the contrary, he was, indeed, an
African-American. The white pastor recalled that no blacks attended his high
school until one day, without notice, the school district bussed in a few
blacks. The bussing met with resentment from the white students, but when blacks
joined the basketball team, the white pastor who was a member of the team, had his
first opportunity to become acquainted with a black person. The black pastor recalled
that, when he was a youngster, his father took the family on a vacation. The
family traveled north in their late model car until, spotting a sign on the
highway advertising a nearby Bed & Breakfast, the black pastor’s father
turned off the highway, stopped at a quaint little motel and went inside to
register. However when the pastor’s mother and his siblings left the car, the motel’s
immigrant manager told the pastor’s father that they had made a mistake.
“Negroes are not allowed here,” the manager declared in an Irish brogue. The
black pastor recalled how embarrassed his mother became, blaming his father for
subjecting them to white racism. When the black pastor attended Harvard, he
adopted an African name in order to overcome the confusion over his racial
identity.

Others shared their own experiences
with white racism. One black woman described how, after rising to a top
position in her corporation, she often attended various conferences and high-level
meetings, but very seldom had the opportunity to interact with “anyone looking
like her.” A white woman told a story about two school children, one white, the
other black who shaved their heads and proclaimed themselves brothers to the
delight of their teacher and their classmates.

,

At an Oakland school, a first grader ‘acted out’ so
badly that his teacher complained to her principal that the six-year old student
was uncontrollable. The principal reminded the teacher that the child had
recently witnessed his sister being shot to death at close range. The teacher
remained unsympathetic and continued to use harsh and abusive language to force
the traumatized child to obey her commands… .

As the ‘unflinching’
discussion about racism continued, a spirit of racial harmony animated the
group. One white fellow at my table felt so comfortable that he told me a joke
about native Americans. How was he to know that my great-grandmother lived on a
reservation just outside of Woodland, California and my grandfather migrated to
California from an Oklahoma reservation? Since Pope Francis’ visit to the US to
canonize Junipero Serra, the infamous murderer, torturer and enslaver of hundreds
of thousands of native Americans, white folks have felt less guilty about the native
American genocide. Nor do they worry about the endless number of broken treaties,
the most recent of which occurred on tribal lands at Standing Rock in North
Dakota. White folks have never considered it necessary to keep any of the
treaties they made with native peoples. The US government’s treatment of native
peoples reflects white people’s attitude
towards non-white people all over the world. The ‘unflinching’ discussion about
white racism did not touch on these matters, but continued in the spirit of the
integration achieved in America’s post-racial society. Once the discussion was
over, the group joined hands for a congratulatory prayer. On the way home, my
wife and I discussed how we had just witnessed how racial ‘bubbles’ function.

Pathways Between Racial Bubbles

Race was not the only thing
that separated the two Christian congregations. A great ribbon of concrete that
connected the Caldecott Tunnel to the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge also
physically separates the two churches. This gigantic freeway speeds hundreds of
thousands of suburbanites from Contra Costa County through Oakland to their jobs,
for some in San Francisco, for others further south in Silicon Valley. This
great-eight lane freeway joins four other freeways crisscrossing Oakland
alongside rapid transit skyways and railroad tracks, connecting Oakland’s container
and airport facilities in one, gigantic transportation hub. This transportation
hub has made San Francisco and Silicon Valley the financial and technology
capitals of the western hemisphere and turned Oakland into a crime-ridden
ghetto.

Oakland’s maze of
transportation facilities was created in the 1960s when whites began selling
their homes to an emerging black middle class before fleeing through the
Caldecott Tunnel into the suburbs. With ‘white flight’ in full swing, the
government began confiscating great chunks of land from the recent black
homeowners, asserting the right of eminent
domain. Then the great freeways were constructed, ripping through the middle
class neighborhoods and stultifying Oakland’s emerging black middle class just as
it was beginning to benefit from recent advances in civil rights. The freeway
constructions depressed property values and caused local businesses to fail, crushing
Oakland’s black middle class under the weight of the government-engineered
economic collapse. Black middle class neighborhoods were transformed into crime
ridden ‘ghettos’ and black homeownership was replaced by renter-occupied housing
owned by absentee landlords. Public housing units were erected all over the
city into which the government dumped tons of drugs and arsenals of guns. Oakland
was engulfed in drug trafficking, gang violence and murder. Gradually,
thousands of people, lacking any economic opportunity, neither able to become
homeowners nor renters, began to settle beneath those gigantic ribbons of
concrete that take white folks from their comfortable middle class suburbs to
their places of employment and entertainment. The concrete thoroughfares separated
Oakland into racial bubbles, the most depressed occupied by a homeless black population
living beneath the ribbons of concrete; the most prosperous of which are the whites
living in the suburbs who even now are testing whether or not Oakland is safe
enough for them to return.

Beneath The Concrete

Beneath the concrete, invisible
to the whites speeding over Oakland’s freeways, thousands of black people camp
our in their tents, blue canvas coverings, shopping carts and cardboard boxes. Trying
to survive in what white people call the ‘greatest country in the world,’ the
homeless struggle daily against hunger, against sickness, against the elements
and against each other. Beneath the concrete, the homeless see America as it
is: a fascist police state whose policymakers are interested only in creating
more suffering and misery to further the interests of the billionaire class.

Thousands of homeless
children live beneath the concrete. See that young prostitute screaming
obscenities at her toddler for not keeping up. Homeless children receive their only
hot meal from the Oakland School District’s school lunch program. Betsy DeVos,
Trump’s billionaire education secretary, is making plans to cancel hot meals so
that she and her cronies can steal government more of the charter schools funding.
Homeless seniors troop to storefronts that serve hot meals provided by federal
programs. Trump intends to cut these programs to pay for the “wall” that will
make rich white folks feel safe from illegal immigrants. Some white folks question
who will do the menial labor once all the ‘illegals’ are eliminated. Plans are
being developed to create a convict workforce. Convict labor will be cheaper
than illegal immigrants ____ and there will be no union agitation. Pope Francis
approves of this strategy; after all, Paul Ryan is a Roman Catholic. Once on
the Supreme Court. Judge Gorsuch, also a Catholic and the founder and president
of the “Fascism Forever” Club at his Georgetown high school will guarantee that
no legal challenge to a reintroduction of slavery will succeed.

Do you see that black man with
one leg in his wheelchair trying to push a shopping cart filled with cans and
bottles to the recycling center? He’s a Vietnam vet who lives beneath the
concrete. He lost his leg while killing Vietnamese women and children, burning
their villages and destroying their crops. Afterwards he, like many other black
war veterans returned to the US to find their reward: joblessness, drug
addiction and poverty. He and other Vietnam vets share their stories with black
veterans who tortured and murdered women and children in Iraq and Afghanistan. White
folks fear non-white women and children all over the world and for decades have
been killing them in the thousands. Today white folks don’t need as many killers
as before. Now they can kill women and children with drones. Werner von Braun pioneered
drone warfare for Adolf Hitler. Before coming to the US, the Nazi war criminal
helped develop the V-1 and V-2 rockets that killed thousands of women and
children in London. After WWII, American fascists told their government: We need that guy!

On Sundays, whether I attend
Mass with my daughter or go to church with my wife, I take Oakland’s 27th
Street off ramp. Great numbers of homeless occupy this particularly wide underpass
area where the old Sears Department store ___ now vacated ___ once served
thousands of shoppers. Some Sundays, however, the homeless are sitting on curbs
___ their arms pinned behind, their hands fastened in plastic cuffs ___ waiting
to be loaded into police vans while their pitiful belongings are pitched into garbage
trucks. A homeless roundup makes white folks feel real safe ___ safer than
Trump’s wall, safer than Clinton’s war on terror and safer than Reagan’s war on
drugs. Recent surveys say that San Francisco’s rising homeless rate is
responsible for the dramatic reduction in San Francisco’s tourist trade. It
seems that poverty and despair in the midst of such affluence is too distressing
to some foreign visitors. When Donald Trump and his billionaire cabinet gets
Congress to pass their military-police
budget, there will be a lot more homelessness, not only in San Francisco, but
all over the country. Then the fascists will be forced to come up with a final solution.

The Golden State Warriors

Oakland has a great
basketball team. White folks come from all over northern California using the
giant ribbons of concrete and rapid transit facilities to get to Oracle Arena and
watch blacks athletes play basketball for the Golden State Warriors. Only one
white player is on the Warriors team; he comes from Europe. White Europeans who
play basketball have no problem getting into the United States, just as the thousands
of Nazi and fascist war criminals had no difficulty immigrating here after WWII.
Unlike blacks living under the concrete, America has jobs for fascists who are
good at conducting inhumane social and medical experiments, managing concentration
camps and handling spy networks. WWII fascists gave white folks the intelligence,
the global reach and the sinister capability that America needed to assassinate
political leaders, overthrow governments and engage in perpetual wars. But
policymakers do not speak of American fascism; they speak of American
‘exceptualism.’ They do not speak about the police state; they speak of the military
and industrial complex. From inside academia, research firms and corporations, fascists
have transformed the American government into a criminal enterprise.

But the black basketball
players with the Warriors are untroubled by such matters. They are prosperous
and live in the suburbs with white people. When they play basketball, they use
to the freeways to get to Oracle Arena to the delight of their fans. The black
basketball players are as blind to the homeless living beneath the concrete, as
are the prosperous, self-satisfied whites they entertain.

During a recent Golden State Warriors –Milwaukee Bucks
game, the television broadcasters demonstrated how ‘alternate reality’ works in
the age of Trump. When the announcement was made that the legendary Rock and
Roll icon, Chuck Berry, had passed, one Warrior’s commentator asserted that
Chuck Berry had gotten his start by copying the music of Marty McFly, the
character in the movie, Back To The
Future. In a fascist society, every means
of propaganda ___ no matter how ridiculous ___ is used to extoll the
achievements of white supremacy.

The Golden State Warriors
will soon leave Oakland for their new home across the bridge in San Francisco. Next
the white folks need to figure out how to transport all of the homeless people hurting
San Francisco’s tourist trade into Oakland. This is the type of population problem
the Third Reich faced in the 1930s and 1940s. Though US planners have adopted
some of the Third Reich’s population policies, it will soon be forced to adopt
many more. Fascists have been handling America’s population problems, here in
the US and around the world, for nearly eighty years which is why thousands of
homeless live beneath the concrete in Oakland. Getting them into permanent
concentration camps is the next step. As Adolph Eichmann would have said: it is
just a matter of logistics.

Lund Celebration

While at the University of
California, I studied at Sweden’s University of Lund through the university’s Education
Abroad Program. Last year I was invited to the special reception at the
Presidio in San Francisco honoring dignitaries from the University of Lund and the
University of California in advance of Lund’s 350th anniversary celebration.
Initially, I looked forward to attending the event. However, with the rash of police
shootings of unarmed black men, I decided that it would be unwise for me to go wandering
through a military installation at night. After the reception, a former
classmate told me that a number of them were going back to Sweden to
participate in the festivities. But, though I was born in the US, have native
American heritage and a US passport, Trump’s ‘make white folks feel safe’ travel ban makes it unsafe for a black
man to travel outside the country. With the number of ‘black sites’ white folks
maintain in the US and around the world, I could be detained indefinitely trying
to return to the US, once I had left. This is the ‘unflinching’ reality of racism
in America.

The Swedish Ombudsman

In 1968, the Swedish
Ombudsman, Alfred Bexelius, exercised considerable moral authority over Swedish
society. So while attending Sweden’s University of Lund, I decided to study the
Justitieombudsman Institutionen, Sweden’s
Ombudsman Institution. A political science professor directed my studies and a Lund
court judge who sat on the Ombudsman’s staff served as my mentor. These two gentlemen
gave me access to documents, tours of government institutions and interviews
with politicians, journalists and government bureaucrats. It was a wonderful
experience.

The theory behind the Swedish
Ombudsman is contained in the idea För att gå till
kungen ___ “To go to the king.” By tradition, all Swedish citizens have the right to take any grievance they
might have against the government directly to the Swedish king. “To go to the king” gives Swedish citizens the expectation
that their grievances will be resolved not in accordance with legal precedent or
legislative intent, but on the basis of moral
right and wrong. As the king’s representative, the Ombudsman observes the practices
of governmental and non-governmental authorities, alike. The Ombudsman decides
which practices conform with Swedish custom and meet the Ombudsman’s standards of
morality and which practices do not. The Ombudsman holds those in authority to
a strict standard of moral behavior.

Though the
Ombudsman’s office accepts complaints from Swedish citizens, the office is far more
proactive than reactive. The Ombudsman and his staff oversee conduct within
Swedish society by identifying practices that conflict with common decency and
moral behavior. Practices, such as inequities in pay treatment, substandard conditions
in prisons, violations of the right of free speech, are exmpless of practices
that the Ombudsman will investigate even before a formal complaint is filed.
Once the Ombudsman completes his investigation, he renders an opinion that can range
from a mere comment about the propriety of a certain practice to a formal reprimand.
Because of his own prestige and the respect Swedes have for the judges on his
staff, the office can identify practices that are entirely unacceptable. In
these cases, the Ombudsman can recommend fundamental changes in entire
operations without recourse to any legal or administrative procedures. Furthermore,
the Ombudsman can require the offending official or institution to accept extra-judicial
settlements. The Swedish Ombudsman could never function in an overly legalistic
society such as the United States. In circumstances where the Swediah Ombudsman
finds that a problem is not the fault of an individual, but a regulatory or
legal oversight, the Ombudsman will recommend appropriate corrective regulatiory
or legislative changes.

An institution
like the Swedish Ombudsman would have no authority in the US where political
power is acquired through corruption. In the US, the law favors those with money,
political connections and a membership in a secret society. Power in the US is
acquired through hypocrisy and deception and wielded by force and violence. Moral
authority carries no weight, whatsoever. The government has even bought off
religious criticism with the so-called faith-based funding. Bush gave churches
federal funds nearly a decade ago to guarantee there would be no criticism of
his illegal and immoral war on Iraq ___ a war that has plunged civilized
society into a barbaric abyss. Bush’s faith-based funding so corrupted
religious authority that recently a group of West Oakland preachers divided up
a $1 Millon bribe ____ thirty pieces of silver in the time of Christ ___ to
support the open air transportation of coal to ships in the Port of Oakland,
despite the health risks to the residents of West Oakland ___ many of whom were
members of the preacher’s own congregations. In America, corruption is an acceptable
way of getting things done.

In Sweden, corruption at any level is challenged
by the moral authority of the Ombudsman. Corruption in Sweden is so reprehensible
that the entire society actively participates its suppression. On the other
hand, Swedish socioligist, Gunnar Myrdal, the author of The American Dilemma: The Negro Problem In The American Democracy, proposed
fascist solutions to halt the growth of the Negro population. Myrdal’s moral ambiguity when it came to race
in America demonstrates that even the Swedish committment to a moral society
operates within a racial bubble.